Subdesarrollo y cultura: una historia conceptual de la izquierda cultural latinoamericana en los años sesenta.

Abstract

: The essay seeks to analyse the conceptual trajectories of the intersection between underdevelopment and culture in the cultural media of the Left in Latin America during the 1960s. To that end, it proposes a reading of two spaces of discussion that are representative of Left-wing intellectuals during the period: the editorial circuit linked to the Cuban journal Casa de las Américas and the Cultural Congress of Havana (1968). The paper holds that Latin American cultural producers are able to generate a specific inflection in the concept of underdevelopment that identifies correlations between an economic and a cultural infrastructure, while at the same time practising a strong ambiguity in the semantic contents of the concept as it was used in the field of social sciences at the time.